Email marketing – it’s the little gem that can give you a huge return. In a world a flurry with social media, live broadcasts and so much more, email may get lost in the shuffle, but if you decide to ignore it, you are making a major mistake.

It’s so important that Get Response – an email marketing company conducted a study on 2 billion emails. 2 billion! That’s a lot of emails and a lot of data. In that data many revelations were found such as the best day to send an email, the best time of that day, and the number of characters you should have in your subject line for best chance of a higher open rate. What were they? We’ll go into all of that plus find a way to get the full list of industry benchmarks for email open rates, click through rates and more, to use as your very own cheat sheet right in your inbox.

Let’s go.

In this test of 2 billion emails the days emails were sent were studied in terms of open rates. There is actually a specific day you definitely should send an email and days you should shy away from it. The best day for sending emails to your list? Ready for this one? Many have long thought Wednesday was the best day. That’s not so anymore, it has been unseated. The best day with an average open rate of 23.13% is…..Thursday! That’s right, Thursday is the day, but did you know the time of day is also just as important, if not even more so? Send your emails out at 4 pm on Thursday, statistically you will win from an open rate point of view.

So now you know the best day and time for sending email blasts or messages. As you know, there are many components to a successful email blast, one of which is the subject line. It’s what the email recipient sees before they open the email, it is what lies between your message being read or becoming one of the unread messages in an email inbox. While there are a lot of tips that could be given on what to include (or not include) in your email subject line, we don’t have time to discuss that too much today. What we will talk about is, the number of characters in an email subject line. In this case, subject line length matters. Looking at subject lines ranging anywhere from 0 – 10 characters all the way to just under 100 characters. Which number of characters is best for open rate according to the Get Response results? 61-70. You will want to try to keep your subject lines in that general range as they outperformed all other ranges sitting at an average open rate of 17%.

There you have it, a ton of data in a big study, dialed down and presented in a way that we hope is easy to digest and that you can quickly start using for your email marketing efforts.

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